Businesses in industries such as financial services, insurance, travel and hospitality, retail, cable and satellite television rely on voice contact with customers to answer client inquiries, make sales, and provide technical support. A greater utilization of smart phones and advanced mobile devices by customers has resulted in an increasing number of voice calls to such businesses. For such businesses, every contact with a customer is an opportunity to make a lasting impression, to gather customer data, or to strengthen a customer's loyalty to the business. With regard to customer calls, it is desirable to know whether customers are receiving quality customer service that includes accurate information, adherence to professional communication standards, and the conveyance of a feeling of being valued by the business.
One reporting tool used by businesses to track and analyze voice transactions is call recordation, with or without transcription. By listening to recorded customer calls (in their entirety or in samples), or reviewing the transcripts of recorded customer calls, businesses hope to gain insight from conversations with real customers. However, the recording of calls incurs several problems and disadvantages, such as agent and/or caller objections, legal and privacy concerns, and the need for expensive and specialized equipment.
Another technique which businesses utilize to evaluate calls and boost advertising performance is known as call mining or keyword spotting. In call mining, businesses identify key words and phrases to be tracked in every call (e.g., “credit card,” “appointment,” “thank you,” “sale”) so as to determine which calls were converted into sales or appointments, and caller intent, needs and pain points. The details of the calls can be accessed as needed by reading call transcripts and then listening to call recordings for granular details on specific calls.
While the aim of call mining is to find successful outcomes and conversions, call mining is based on the words spoken in the call, acquired in either a manual or automated fashion. Every call must generally be recorded, which can be costly or prohibited for various reasons. In some cases, a transcript can be inaccurate because it was transcribed with bad audio quality. At times, the vocabulary of the conversation can be foreign to a transcriber. Even when a set of vocabulary is provided or defined for a transcription broker, the results can still be unusable. Other schemes to analyze call outcomes such as live monitoring can also involve additional costs and drawbacks.
Thus, there is a need for an improved system and method that can automate the analysis of call outcomes without requiring either recording or transcription.